Last month, Esri held its Geodesign Summit, which is an annual gathering of professionals interested in using geospatial technologies to arrive at the best and most sustainable design solutions.

The event’s keynote speaker was Bran Ferren, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds. His organization invents and prototypes high technology products and innovative business concepts for the aerospace, defense, intelligence, automotive, architecture, computing, and consumer products sectors.

Needless to say Ferren provided a very innovative perspective on where the future of geodesign is headed. In addition, he discussed how geodesign is becoming a new form of storytelling that will elevate the importance of key issues and global topics.

Farren also discussed how Geodesign plays a key role in “making things actionable in the course of human events.” And, he provided a list of the new big six things that you may want to focus on in terms of Geodesign.

According to Farren, design is a privilege and there are three types of design: reality-based design, fantasy-based design and bad design, which is the dominant form of design. Farren pointed out how bad design is very dominant because many forces make it difficult to truly innovative.

This is merely a snapshot of many of the topics covered in the keynote address. To hear a true innovator discuss the future of design, we highly recommend viewing this video below.

The first part of Goodchild’s keynote address focused on how far the geospatial sector has come since 1998. Specifically, he highlighted how we now have faster broadband connections and graphic accelerators, as well as massive amounts of data. All of these things are driving today’s geospatial solutions through we still have challenges ahead of us.

The second half of Goodchild’s keynote address highlighted the global social constructs behind mapping. Each culture has a different interpretation of mapping and what locations are worthy of monitoring – whether it is a sports complex, a Korean deli or a riverbed in Western Australia. Goodchild also discusses how we are creating global mapping standards, as well as localized crowdsourced capabilities.

He also discussed “place-based GIS,” which is focused on core locations and how most cities have adopted standard subways maps (i.e. New York City). This standard is ideal because “humans can use it.”

Be sure to check out part two of Goodchild’s keynote address at GIS-Pro 2012.

On March 4, 2013, there will be a Kenyan election again. Readers might remember that the innovative company Ushahidi influenced the Kenyan election in 2007 and is now asking the question, what would we do differently if we were to do this again?

Ushahidi, in response to that question, announces the official launch of the Uchaguzi Kenya 2013 partnership. Uchaguzi’s goal is to help Kenya hold a fair and credible election. Uchaguzi is a joint initiative between Ushahidi, Constitution and Reform Education Consortium (CRECO) and Hivos Foundation with the additional support of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Citizen participation or crowdsourcing is a big part of Uchaguzi’s strategy, with the Uchaguzi platform built on and by Ushahidi. Citizens will be empowered to report any changes they see in the election.